‘Timeless’ Finale Will Have Emotional Fan Base Waiting for it This Fall

After picking up a loyal following through two seasons, it seemed like the show would end on a cliffhanger when it wrapped up this past May. However, online campaigns and a passion for the show’s sci-fi premise won out — something that was clear to see when the announcement about the two-hour finale came through on July 31.

Emotion measurement AI company Canvs measures Emotional Reactions (ERs) to shows, and despite no episodes of Timeless airing on the 31st, it still generated over 18,000 ERs that day with 31.8% having to do with “love.”

That’s also nothing new for the show, which earns strong ERs when it’s actually on TV as well. Season two of Timeless, which ran earlier this year, generated 155,925 ERs on just 10 episodes — twice the amount from season one, which had 16 episodes. The program began to hit a stride late in season one, and never gave it up. In season two, “love” was the top emotion associated with the show, at 34.2% of all ERs.

The biggest drivers for those reactions have been the show’s three primary stars over the two seasons. Lead Abigail Spencer (Lucy) earned 14.2% of all ERs in season two to lead the way. Malcolm Barrett (Rufus) had 8.6% during that same season. Matt Lanter (Wyatt) actually generated the most ERs (10.8%) in season one, but was supplanted in the top three by NBC itself (10.1%) the second time around. Some of that bump could be due to the network’s cancellation and the subsequent response from fans.

With such a passionate fan base showing up for Timeless, it makes sense that advertisers also want to get in on the attentive audience… and they have during both of the program’s previous runs.

According to iSpot.tv, the real-time TV ad measurement company with attention and conversion analytics from more than eight million smart TVs, Timeless had 1.7 billion TV ad impressions in total for seasons one and two. Those ads also had an average attention score of 88.37 — the percent of advertising viewed across TV devices.

McDonald’s led impressions for all brands, with 37.4 million, followed by Sprint (34.3 million), Amazon Echo (33.7 million) and Subaru (28.5 million). However, according to iSpot’s attention index, the American Lung Association‘s “Who Pneu: Pam’s Story” scored highest with a 182 out of 200, meaning that the spot received 82% fewer interruptions than the average ad during the program. Other attention-grabbing creative during Timeless included GEICO‘s “Meteor: Great Answer” (180) and “Server Farm: Gecko Journey” (177), plus Microsoft Windows 10‘s “The Hulford Quadruplets” (176).

With a two-hour finale in the works, that makes for plenty of time for more ads. Don’t be surprised to see many of these same names popping up for that event as well.